Book Review: Lost in a Good Book (with spoilers!)

A friend recently started teasing me, asking if I ever read anything that wasn’t historical, or over 500 pages, or quite so serious – did I ever read books that were just for fun? Of course I did, I told her – I just don’t write reviews for those ones! The problem is that my reviews for all of the Agatha Christie’s I’ve read would all sound the same after the second one, the few girly-romance novels I read I would never admit to (oops), and the occasional re-read of Stephen King’s, Harry Potters, and beloved children’s series just don’t seem particularly review worthy given that I’ve read them dozens of times. They’re just…for fun.

The thing is, these Jasper Fforde books are serious and fun all at the same time. For one – how can you not love an author with such a fun name? I call him “Fuh-ford” in my head. For another, the premise of his Thursday Next series is the most unique and ingenious world I’ve encountered in recent memory. The downside to that is, like in the first novel, that I felt a bit overwhelmed at times. It’s been five or six months since I read the first novel and there aren’t many refresher lines at the beginning of this sequel to prompt our memories (which is ironic, given the plot). Nope, Fforde throws you right back into Thursday’s world, watching her character deal with the fallout from changing the storyline to Jane Eyre at the end of The Eyre Affair. One pleasant change with the sequel was that I didn’t find it quite as full of minor characters I had to keep track of (which is just as well since I was constantly straining to remember the previous plot-points). Indeed, not only was I trying to keep track of the plot from the first book, I had a bit of an issue trying to figure out where all of the scenes from this book would fit in to the tasks Thursday had at hand. I felt anxious, trying to anticipate how each errand would help Thursday solve the puzzle and tie all the loose ends together; I felt the first book more neatly laid out (and accomplished) the tasks at hand by the end of the novel. In those regards, the book felt more like work.

But wait – didn’t I say this book was fun, too? If all of those things felt “off” about it, how in the world could I come away feeling so good about Lost in a Good Book? Guys – the good parts were THAT GOOD. Example the First: Thursday hears voices in her head…because a secret operative is speaking to her in footnotes. Literally. You have to follow the conversation via the footnotes at the bottom of the page. A riot, right? Well, that’s nothing compared to Example the Second: Miss Havisham. You all know I adore Miss Havisham, from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Once, I even thought I met her twinner. Well. When Thursday Next is forced to jump into books and join Jurisfiction, a literary police force within books, she is apprenticed to Miss Havisham. A wild, car-racing, sneaker-wearing, cop-dodging, sarcastic, larger-than-life Miss Havisham. I could have died and gone to heaven. She’s my favorite character in the entire series so far. She even delivered my favorite line in the novel, which is Example the Third: Miss Havisham is the arch-nemesis of fellow-Jurisfiction member The Red Queen (from Alice in Wonderland, natch). The Red Queen is just as crazy in Fforde’s novel as she is in Carroll’s. Alluding to such characteristics, Miss Havisham describes The Red Queen as being “a verb short of a sentence.” BWAH! I laughed for ten minutes straight when I read that.

Finally, as Example the Last, I give you this: whilst describing how Jurisfiction members jump into books and then leap from book to book via common threads, characters, etc, the Cheshire Cat (who is the master librarian of the Great Library of All Books Ever) tells Thursday Next that there are several books she must never enter.

“There are some places you should not go!” he muttered in a reproachful tone, lashing his tail from side to side. “Edgar Allen Poe is one of them. His books are not fixed; there is a certain otherness that goes with them. Most of Macabre Gothic fiction tends to be like that – Sade is the same; also Webster, Wheatley and King. Go into those and you may never come out – they have a way of weaving you in the story, and before you know it you’re stuck there.”

When I read that, goosebumps popped out all over my body from the tips of my fingers down the bottom of my feet. If you’ll remember, I wrote once about how I’ve always felt that if I leaned forward just the slightest bit, I might topple into one of Stephen King’s books. Apparently, I was right.

Those are just a few of the reasons why I walked away from Lost in a Good Book waiting to be lost in the next one – despite sludging my way through the first half. It reminds me in a way of driving my mom’s old car up the hill on Hamilton Street; the car would grind and churn it’s way up the bitty hill, and we’d laugh and wonder if it would ever make it…and then the car would crest the hill and “break the sound barrier” as we’d joke, and we’d go whipping down the other side laughing and hollering and having a grand old time. The fun and hilarity makes up for an awful lot, don’t you think?

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Tags: book reviews, literature, reading